For five nights during our annual trip to the National Storytelling Festival in Jonesborough, Sheila and I stayed in an Airbnb on Deacon Creek Road near Erwin, Tennessee.
In the backyard of the house next door—was a little log cabin.
Naturally, I noticed it.
It looked old to me. Really old. The broad hewn logs, the chinking, the notched dovetailed corners—I wondered about it each time we passed by. I took some pictures and began wondering how long it had been there and what its story might be.
As it turned out, those logs had stood on Deacon Creek Road only a couple of decades, but they had been fitted together perhaps more than a century and a half ago.
As I loaded the car for our trip home, an elderly gentleman across the lawn hailed me. He was making his way toward us with the aid of a walker. It was Mr. Yates, owner of the cabin.
And, just like that, my idle curiosity turned into a personal tour. We must have spent close to an hour talking with this retired miner and history buff.
Mr. Yates invited us inside the cabin and began telling us its story.
The logs had once stood on Masters Street in Erwin—but you couldn't see them there. An old log cabin had been swallowed up inside a much later clapboard house.
When that house was being torn down in 2008, removal of the siding revealed the old cabin hidden within its walls. Mr. Yates says the cabin dated to about 1840.
He acquired the cabin—or, more precisely, the portion of it that could be saved. He carefully tagged and numbered the logs before taking them apart so that they could be put back in their proper order on his property there on Deacon Creek Road.
What stands there today, therefore, is not the 1840 cabin simply picked up and moved bodily from one place to another. Mr. Yates told us that he saved the logs from the bedroom side of the original two-room cabin, but not the kitchen side. The floors and interior walls are new, as are the stairs leading to a little loft bedroom. Some of the old floor joists got a second life as upright supports, including posts on the porch.
But those weathered horizontal logs are the real thing.
Inside were family pictures on the walls, an old treadle sewing machine, an iron bed—the sorts of things that seemed perfectly at home within those old logs.
Then Mr. Yates invited us into his house, where the story got even better.
He showed us an October 7, 2008, copy of The Erwin Record. Across the front page was an article headlined “‘Hidden’ log cabin uncovered in Erwin.”
The article described contractors peeling the clapboard siding from the old Bailey home on Masters Street and discovering beneath it an intact two-room log cabin. The newspaper said the logs were believed to be native hemlock and chestnut. William F. Wilkins, who had lived across the street for nearly fifty years, told the paper that he had heard there was supposed to be a cabin somewhere inside the house but had never believed it.
Local historian William Cooper, however, had known something was there. In his 2001 book, Old Log Homes of Unicoi County, Cooper had written that a log structure survived within the Bailey house. He described two front rooms served by a double-sided fireplace.
Mr. Yates remembered that double fireplace.
Then our visit wandered—as the best visits often do—into other stories.
He brought out old family photographs and pictures from the Embreeville mines. There was his great-grandfather posing with fellow miners there about a century ago. Mr. Yates had worked in the mines himself—and so had his father, his grandfather, and his great-grandfather.
Four generations of one family connected with the same East Tennessee mining community.
The Embreeville mining district produced iron, zinc, lead and manganese at various times during its long history. Mr. Yates named the particular mine where his family worked and told us what they mined there. Unfortunately, I wasn't taking notes. This was supposed to be a quick conversation with a neighbor while I loaded the car!
There were other photographs and other stories: a handsome young soldier home from Korea with his arm around his beautiful wife; their little boy, Leonard, who would grow up to become a Marine and later a successful baker, only to be killed much too young in an automobile accident while on his way to his bakery.
Leonard and his wife Rhonda had owned Mountain View Bakery. Rhonda continued the bakery after Leonard's death and eventually sold it. Today she is one of the three women behind Three Sisters Conservers, along with Amanda and Lisa, two sisters whose family cooking traditions eventually became a business. Rhonda, with her culinary training and bakery experience, first became their adviser and friend and eventually joined them.
And then Mr. Yates showed me his wood stove.
I hardly needed to be told where that came from.
Cast right into the iron were the words:
EAGLE STOVE WORKS
ROME, GA.
Here I was in Erwin, Tennessee, investigating an old log cabin, and Rome had followed me there.
Rome was once quite a center of ironworking and foundry work—Griffin Foundry, Noble Foundry, Eagle Stove Works and others. And there in Mr. Yates's house was a heavy old Eagle stove that had somehow made the journey from my hometown into the Tennessee mountains.
But the Rome connections didn't stop with the stove.
The whole story of Mr. Yates's cabin reminded me immediately of two log houses back home in Floyd County that were similarly “swallowed” by later buildings.
One is Chieftains, the Major Ridge home in Rome. The old log house was enlarged and altered over the years until the earlier structure was enclosed within the later house. Today those old logs remain part of the fabric of the Major Ridge Home.
The other example is even more like the Masters Street story.
For decades an old log structure in Cave Spring was hidden inside what most people knew as the Green Hotel. When the later building came down, the old Vann Cabin emerged from inside it.
Friends of mine were deeply involved in saving that cabin. Michael Burton, Steve Craw, Billy Abernathy and many other Cave Spring folks worked to see that it survived. Michael even arranged to have new logs hewn to replace several of the originals that were too badly rotted to save.
I was there for the dedication of the reconstructed cabin in 2016...
and went back the following year with my friend Mike Bock for a personal tour with Steve and Laurie Craw.
In a blog post at the time I called the Vann Cabin a treasure that had been “hidden in the walls of the Green Hotel for many decades.”
Nine years later, without looking for one at all, I had stumbled across another hidden cabin.
There are important differences. The Vann Cabin was reconstructed on its historic site and includes both surviving original timbers and replacement logs. The old Masters Street cabin did not remain on its original ground. Mr. Yates salvaged one portion of it, carefully numbered the logs, moved them to Deacon Creek Road, and built them into the cabin we visited.
But I love the common thread.
Somebody builds a log house. Years pass. Tastes change. Families need more room. Instead of tearing down the old house, another generation builds around it. Clapboards cover the logs. Rooms are added. Eventually almost everybody forgets that the first house is still there.
Then, perhaps a century later, somebody starts pulling away the newer walls.
And there it is.
A house hidden inside a house.
Had Mr. Yates not hailed me across the lawn as I loaded our car that morning, I would have driven back to Rome knowing only that there was an interesting old-looking cabin beside our Airbnb.
Instead, he invited two strangers inside.
He showed us his cabin and then his house. Along the way we saw his stove, and through old photographs we “met” his family—the great-granddaddy posing with fellow miners right there in Embreeville a century ago; the handsome young soldier home from Korea, his arm around his beautiful wife; the little son who would grow up to become a Marine and a successful baker before being taken too young in an automobile accident.
And one story led to another—the mines, Mountain View Bakery, Three Sisters Conservers, and finally that old newspaper telling the story of the cabin that had brought us together in the first place.
By the time we finally pulled away from Deacon Creek Road, that little cabin next door wasn't just an old building anymore.
It had become a story.
